“I wish I was there right now.”
“I wish you were here too.”
“Listen. I have to go. If I get caught out here I’m absolutely fucked. I have to get back inside.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll try and call again soon.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Sweet dreams.”
“You too.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sundays were easy because we had the morning off just to clean the barracks and do whatever and we could go to a religious service if we wanted to. I identified with the Hare Krishnas, but they didn’t have a Hare Krishna service so I went to the Buddhist one. You couldn’t go alone. You had to go with a battle buddy. Specialist Kovak was a Buddhist too. We went to talk to the cadre.
I said, “We’re going to a religious service, Drill Sergeant.”
He said, “What religious service are you going to?”
“Buddhist, Drill Sergeant.”
“Go.”
And we went and it was alright and there were a lot of people at the service because the Buddhists gave out mini Reese’s cups. But there was more to the services than just that. We would start off with some deep breathing. Then we would chant for a while, something like twenty minutes’ worth of breathing and chanting. After that the Buddhists would tell us things about Buddhism and they’d ask questions and if you knew the answer then they’d throw candy at you.
On this day Staff Sergeant Rockaway joined us. He said to call him Sergeant Rock. He was real into Buddhism. He said since he started being a Buddhist he had bought a car (paid off) and a motorcycle (paid off). Buddhism had changed his life for the better. He said he’d started being a Buddhist when he was in boot camp, going to the services on Sundays.
“Just like y’all are now,” he said.
* * *
—
THE NEXT day we learned unarmed combatives. Drill Sergeant Cole was teaching us. He taught us the Sleeveless Choke. He taught us the Tokyo Choke. There were all different kinds of chokes we could do. And we all sat in a circle and we were supposed to take turns choking each other. They sent two of us at a time into the middle of the circle, and the object was one of us was to choke the other one out. I was paired with Specialist Kovak because we were about the same size. I choked the shit out of him. When it was over I got the idea that I had surprised him and I felt bad about it. The next time I let him choke the shit out of me. Still I felt bad about it. Kovak was my battle buddy, and I’d choked him.
* * *
—
THE ONLY way not to graduate basic was to try and kill yourself. One kid tried hanging himself from the drop ceiling in the latrine. It didn’t work. He brought the ceiling down. So he didn’t die. But he didn’t graduate either.
My parents came down for the graduation. A lot of people’s families came. A lot of people’s families didn’t come. We marched around on the stage in an auditorium and did cadences. The Toby Keith song was played and we were all dismissed with a day pass good till 21:00. My parents took me to Chili’s. I ordered a veggie burger.
My mom said, “I bet that’s the first veggie burger you’ve had in a while.”
“Actually, no,” I said. “MRE number twelve is a veggie burger in barbecue sauce. It’s not bad, but this is much better.”
We had time to kill, so we hung out at the hotel room they had in the town by the base. My mom took a lot of pictures of me in my Class A uniform. And I smoked cigarettes (Winston Reds), and those were really good. And after a little while we went back to Fort Leonard Wood, and we said goodbye to one another there.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Those of us who were healthcare-specialists–to-be got on a bus. We were going to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. The bus driver was a Vietnam vet with a right hand that had been melted into a red fleshy claw back in his white phosphorus days. He was an agreeable man, and he encouraged us to drink and smoke on the bus. When we got to Fort Sam there were all-new drill sergeants who yelled at us, but the whole drill sergeant thing was played out by then and we didn’t give a fuck if they yelled or not. All the same we pretended like we were scared shitless so they’d overlook our being beer-drunk and smelling like cigarettes.
We were in the intake a few days, waiting for groups to show up from the other basics. Then everybody was there and we found out we were called Charlie Company and we got on a bus to go to our next barracks. There was a girl from North Dakota named Private Harlow, and she told everyone on the bus how she liked dipping Copenhagen and getting gangbanged. So she was popular. And we all thought about what it would be like to gangbang Private Harlow.
* * *
—
WE ARRIVED at the company. The prior service were there already. The prior service either could be military personnel changing their MOSs and branches of service or could be ex-military people who had enlisted again after they’d been failures in the civilian world. They’d get trained with us. Most of them looked like shit. And they were bad for morale; they ruined our expectations as far as what we thought we were about to become.
The training battalion had a mantra: Warrior Medic. Naturally everyone thought it was stupid. Yet the cadre were supposed to call us Warrior Medics. So it was like that. And it was to last 14 weeks. But we were supposed to get weekend passes after a while.
It was all classroom instruction in the beginning, which was a welcome change from basic, from digging graves and freezing our asses off in the woods and getting gassed. We had EMT textbooks, and we listened to lectures. It was a lot of PowerPoint, and some Faces of Death now and then. The Faces of Death was meant to get us used to mortality. We watched a guy break his neck when his car rolled. We saw an eviscerated motorcycle rider. We saw a chick who had got stabbed about a million times.
There were two instructors per platoon, an E-6 (staff sergeant) and a civilian paramedic. Our civilian paramedic was Ms. Grey. She was hot and probably a lesbian. But never mind. She was an expert. She worked on the Life Flight out of a hospital in San Antonio and she knew more than most Army medics put together.
The E-6 looked like Harold Ramis, and he chain-smoked mentholated Camels. He’d been in the Army 15 years and he told us shit he thought we needed to know about it: namely the ways people died in the Army. He also told us you could use tampons to treat gunshot wounds. He said you ought to use unscented tampons. I asked him if he had ever been stationed at Fort Drum. He said, “Why do you ask, Warrior Medic?”
I said I wanted to go to Fort Drum because my girl lived in Elba, New York, and it was just a couple hours away.
He said, “Don’t ever ask to go to Fort Drum. You’ll spend more time in the field there than you will anywhere else, it gets cold as hell, and she’s just going to cheat on you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Drill Sergeant Masters was a perfect honky if ever there were such a thing. He addressed the company formation: “WARRIOR MEDICS, YOU WERE TOLD TO COME UP WITH A COMPANY CHEER. YOU WERE GIVEN A WEEK TO DO THIS. THIS IS WHAT IS CALLED A DEADLINE. AS OF NOW YOU HAVE MISSED THE DEADLINE….OPEN RANKS.”
We said, “OPEN RANKS.”
“HALF-LEFT…FACE.”
We did a half-left face. Which was bad news. It meant the fucker was going to smoke us.
“FRONT.”
This was even worse news. It meant Front-Back-Go’s. When he said “FRONT,” we were supposed to drop down and start doing push-ups till he said otherwise.
So we did.
“…BACK.”
Now we were supposed to roll over and start doing sit-ups. I didn’t like sit-ups, especially on concrete. They made my ass hurt.
“…GO!”
Now we were supposed to jump up and run in place like Sweatin’ to the Oldies. And we’d do that till he said “FRONT” or “BACK” again. Front, Back, and Go could come in any order at any interval for any duration.
“FRONT…BACK…GO!—FRONT!—BACK!…GO!—BACK…GO!—FRONT—BACK—GO!—FRONT—GO!”